This term in year 4, we are learning about electricity in Science. Last week, we started by exploring what a complete circuit would look like and what is required to make a bulb light up.
This week, we used our complete circuits to test if materials were insulators or conductors. Our topic this half term is ‘Electrify’, linked with our book ‘The Iron Man’ by Ted Hughes. Later in the term, we will be using our electricity knowledge to create our own Iron Men with headlamp eyes!
This week in Outdoor Learning, each year 4 class has written a poem about winter.
Year 4 have started the new term to an incredible beginning. We began the week by exploring our focus for this half term, The Iron Man by Ted Hughes. In Writing, we have discovered figurative language such as alliteration, similes, metaphors and onomatopoeia. We have found examples of this in The Iron Man and created our own examples to write short poems about the Iron Man.
In Art, we explored sketching techniques and practiced hatching, contour hatching, cross hatching and smudging. Our final piece, is a chalk drawing of The Iron Man. See some examples of our work below!
This week we started to read the book Meerkat Mail. We met Sunny the Meerkat who lives in the Kalahari desert. The children found out about meerkats, where they live, what they eat and how they survive in the desert. We also received a post card from Sunny. Sunny told them about his habitat and the children wrote down some of the things they learnt from the postcard. We also found out about the Jewish Creation Story and about the importance of Shabbat, which is the Jewish day of rest.
All of this half term we have focused our learning around the storybook of ‘Lost and found’ by Oliver Jeffers. We have been creating story maps, fact files and even our own books based on what we can remember from the story. The children have worked really hard to memorize and recreate the story in their writing with a focus on the three parts of the story (beginning, middle and end).
Last week, year 4 made Roman catapults. We worked hard in our talk partner pairs and learned lots of new skills including using a junior hacksaw and hot glue guns safely. When they were complete we tried them out!
This week year 1 have performed Christmas song for their grown ups, used a paint program to draw snowmen and learnt the story of Lost and Found. The children are learning the story and planning it out ready to write it independently next week.
This week we have also been summarising our learning about the Romans. We have such a huge range of knowledge about the Romans and their powerful empire since we have been researching them in our History lessons. This week, we learned about Roman towns. We also discussed and considered what makes a good historian and how we know so much about these Roman towns. We discovered that many cities today contain remains from Roman times.
In Geography and Writing this week, year 4 have been learning about the stages of a volcano erupting. This is going to help us with writing an explanation text about how a volcano erupts.
We started the week by learning about tectonic plates. We used this jigsaw to understand that where they meet is often where earthquakes and volcanoes occur. We demonstrated where volcanoes happen using a map and finally sequenced the events of a volcano erupting.
This week we have been learning more about 2D and 3D shapes. We learnt what the difference was and found out the shapes names. We talked about the different properties of shapes. We now know what sides, corners and faces are.